CES 2009: Broadcom Doubles 'Wideband' Bonds

Debuts Eight-Channel DOCSIS 3.0 Chips; Announces Cisco As CMTS Customer

By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 1/7/2009 2:20:00 PM

Las Vegas -- Broadcom is introducing its first DOCSIS 3.0 family of chips, providing the ability to bond eight channels together for downstream speeds of up to 400 Mbps in its second generation of “wideband” cable-modem silicon.

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The company’s newest DOCSIS 3.0 portfolio, announced Wednesday here at the CES trade show, includes a single-chip solution for cable modems and a chip set with advanced line-rate capabilities for cable modem termination systems (CMTSs).

Broadcom also announced that Cisco Systems plans to incorporate one of the new DOCSIS 3.0 components in its next-generation CMTS equipment.

While the DOCSIS 3.0 specification requires cable-modem gear to bond a minimum of four channels, Broadcom acknowledged that cable operators are increasingly expecting platforms that can support up to eight.

"DOCSIS 3.0 solutions like this are supporting the industry's evolution from broadband to wideband," Comcast chief technology officer Tony Werner said, in a statement. "As we develop more advanced services with the need for higher bandwidth, it will be a big advantage to have advanced modems that can support faster speeds than the minimum that today's DOCSIS 3.0 specification provides." 

Comcast has been the most aggressive MSO to deploy DOCSIS 3.0 technology, which it refers to as “wideband” cable modems. The operator said it now offers cable-modem service with up to 50-Mbps downloads to 10 million customer premises, in markets that include Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta, Baltimore, Minneapolis/St. Paul and Boston, Washington State and Oregon.

Broadcom’s BCM3380 family of single-chip silicon for cable modems requires “only memory to provide complete DOCSIS functionality,” the company said.

The chip integrates a QAM receiver with split wideband tuners that do not have the channel lineup limitations of single-frequency window solutions. An integrated multichannel upstream power amplifier eliminates the need for external power amplifiers, and integrated Gigabit Ethernet and USB transceivers reduce the cost of external components, according to Broadcom.

Texas Instruments, a key Broadcom competitor in the cable-modem space, last September announced an eight-downstream DOCSIS 3.0 solution, the TNETC4840, which added four demodulators to the core four-channel chip set.

Broadcom's BCM3380 works in conjunction with the new CMTS chip set to provide up to 160 Mbps upstream and up to 400 Mbps downstream.

The CMTS chip set includes an eight-way downstream modular CMTS core media access controller (MAC), an upstream MAC, and a 12-channel universal advanced time-division multiple access (A-TDMA) and synchronous code division multiple access (S-CDMA) physical layer (PHY) receiver. Cisco selected the PHY component for its next generation DOCSIS 3.0-based CMTS equipment.

In addition, Broadcom has developed a DOCSIS 3.0 CMTS reference design that supports twelve upstream channels and eight downstream channels.

Broadcom said all the new eight-channel DOCSIS 3.0 chips are available now. The company did not disclose pricing.

To date, according to Broadcom, it has sold more than 2 million channel-bonding DOCSIS system-on-chip solutions.